The Doomsday Clock is an internationally recognized design that conveys how close we are to destroying our civilization with dangerous technologies of our own making. First and foremost among these are nuclear weapons, but the dangers include climate-changing technologies, emerging... Read More

Much of the conversation about winter-safe deterrence has focused on a hypothetical decision between deterrence with nuclear weapons and deterrence with non-contagious biological weapons (NCBWs). I regret that the conversation has been framed in this way.

If the Obama administration does not put in place an affordable nuclear weapons strategy for the coming decades, nuclear strategy will be set by bureaucratic struggles and congressional politics. This is not strategy; it is an accident waiting to happen.

The author argues that, to the extent intellectual property rights pose an obstacle to the adoption of low-carbon technologies in developing countries, solutions beyond the imposition of compulsory licenses are available.

Today, more than 25 years after the end of the Cold War, the members of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Science and Security Board have looked closely at the world situation and found it so threatening that the hands of the Doomsday Clock must once again be set at three minutes to midnight.

The author argues that nuclear modernizations are inevitable but progress toward disarmament can still be achieved if nuclear-armed nations, Russia and the United States above all, reduce the importance of nuclear weapons in their national security strategies.

In this essay, adapted from his 2014 Linus Pauling Legacy Award Lecture, Zia Mian, from Princeton University’s Program on Science and Global Security, argues that the ideas Nobel laureate Linus Pauling and other scientists struggled hard over the decades to teach the world have now become widely

The author argues that the Obama administration’s refusal to accept limits on missile defense makes it impossible to achieve nuclear goals such as maintaining strategic stability and pursuing disarmament.

Close study of photographic and video imagery of Israeli Iron Dome defense inceptors engaging with Hamas rockets—both in the current conflict and in the 2012 hostilities—shows that the Israeli rocket-defense system's success rate has been very low—as low as 5 percent or, perhaps, even less.